6JSC/LC/3: Elimination of RDA treatment for "names not conveying the idea of …"
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Deadline for entering comments: August 28, 2011
Is there a concern for the utility of this rule revision in non-encoded contexts – e.g. for card catalogs or even public displays of OPAC where coding is lacking or not visible for conveying whether such names are names at all and whether they are personal or corporate? MYERS, MARBI Liaison, 2011/08/16
This is a excellent example of the kind of redundancy that MUST be removed from RDA. All but the last two paragraphs of 8.3 are simply a verbatim restatement of guidelines that were already given in 0.6.4. Since these two chunks *always* must be identical (i.e., it's one instruction, written down twice), why is the repetition necessary? Would it not be better to instead have a reference in 8.3 to the appropropraite guidelines in 0.6.4? That way, it only needs to be changed in one place.
Now that I have that off my chest, I generally agree with the changes proposed in the document. I do have a problem with this statement in the background section: "The context of “person” or “corporate body” will already be clear because of the element selected for recording the name in RDA (preferred name for the person, preferred name for the corporate body), and/or the mark-up standard used in metadata (e.g., X00 Personal names or X10 Corporate names in MARC 21, or <name> element in MADS with type attributes of personal or corporate)." The context will "already be clear" to whom? The users aren't going to know that a name is the RDA element "preferred name for the corporate body", nor are they going to know what markup tags are being applied to the name. Those things may—OR MAY NOT—have an effect on the way the name is displayed to the user; it all depends on how the display interface is processing the markup. That being said, I don't know if I'm as concerned as John Myers is about this. So far I have a feeling that just the context of the rest of the display (other names, other RDA elements such as titles, statements of responsibility, annotations, etc.) in which the name appears will probably be enough for the user. K. Randall, 8/24/11